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[–] 59 points 1 year ago (16 children)

“To the best of our knowledge, it is the largest data center — we think of it as a campus — in the world,” OpenAI’s chief global affairs officer Chris Lehane told The Associated Press last week. “It generates, roughly and depending how you count, about a gigawatt of energy.”

Why is this guy saying a datacenter generates energy? It does literally the exact opposite. I guess you don't need to actually know anything to get a leadership role at openai, as long as you can say lots of words.

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  • [–] 9 points 1 year ago (1 child)

    Some of these facilities do generate a significant portion of their own electricity via various means. It's not like that amount of energy is just sitting out there on the grid waiting to be used. Somebody has to generate it and if you're already investing millions in rectifiers, batteries, and other data center power systems, why wouldn't you consider taking it a step further?

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  • [–] 7 points 1 year ago

    Tell me it’s not gonna be generating power with “portable“ generators that narrowly avoid stricter regulation thanks to the guy who bought Twitter pushing them around the data center parking lot every few months.

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  • [–] 4 points 1 year ago

    But this proposed data center is so big, it would have its own dedicated energy from gas generation and renewable sources, according to Collins and company officials.

    The "depending on how you count" probably refers to the renewables.

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  • [–] 7 points 1 year ago (5 children)

    Yeah that language is pure corporate BS - data centers CONSUME energy at massive scales (up to 1 gigawatt in this case, which is insane), they're literally just giant heaters that occasionally produce AI outputs as a byproduct of all that wasted electricty.

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  • [–] 1 point 1 year ago

    1 gigawatt is not that insane, and I doubt it's what the datacenter consumes. A rack can easily get into double, even triple digits kW for GPU heavy setups. So let's say 10 racks per Megawatt. I'm sure such a datacenter has more than 10.000 racks. Plus A/C, and all other "ancillary" uses. A normal datacenter can get close to 1 GW, this thing might be double digits, but I doubt they will publish exact numbers.

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  • [+] 3 points 1 year ago (3 children)
  • [–] 1 point 1 year ago (2 children)

    More like a GW of heat... Thankfully I'm sure that will counteract whatever has caused it to be over 80 degrees on my way to work before 0700.

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  • [–] 0 points 1 year ago (1 child)

    Every square kilometer of land (0.38 Sq miles in freedom units) gets about a GW of heat from the sun (depending on latitude). I doubt one datacenter will contribute that much...

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  • [–] 1 point 1 year ago

    I don't know, I've been in some hot places but massive cooling towers tend to radiate a bit more (now I know what I'm reading about today) and a data center without the ability to pump heat outside isn't going to make it a whole day before it's toast.

    Not necessarily disagreeing, just curious about how much heat is dispersed by the ones here.

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